October 23, 2014

“For its fifth anniversary, HMD's
Bridge Project presents Have We Come A Long Way, Baby?, a program
that celebrates and explores a West Coast post-modern dance lineage
through an intergenerational lineup of female soloists.”

Anna Halprin

The Courtesan and the Crone (1999)

Anna Halprin, one of the most
innovative, experimental and influential of dance artists, performed
a mime piece; a five minute dance-theater work wearing a Venetian
mask that was a gift from her daughter and a floor-length gold cloak
that she previously wore to the White House. 94 years old. Fragile.
Eager to make contact. To move. To move us. To touch. I felt lucky to
share this moment that vastly transcended the actual choreography and
yet of course was deeply implicated in its embodied narrative and
mimicry, desire and nostalgia, power and loss. Halprin's courtesan
was articulate and unabashed. She presented the mask of a younger
woman and the body that still remembers her, at least in gestural
fragments. Her crone fluctuated between grief – what have I become?
– and a calm resolve or affirmation. We applauded. Anna smiled and
bowed and exited carefully, each step significant.

Simone Forti

News Animation (1980-current)

An improvisation about water, Syria,
cockroaches, a baby... is also an improvisation about Simone Forti,
aging, improvisation, politics, and art. A way or reading and
re-reading the news, News Animation, since 1980, has modeled a
creative process for bridging the many gaps between Forti's (and
perhaps y/our) lived experience and the political realities presented
and framed as news. White haired and 70 plus, she knows her body, how
it can get to the floor and back up without excessive effort, how it
feels.

Meandering movement – she reveals an
artist looking and finding – but then the mood shifts sharply as
she walks directly toward us, speaking, “So we're bombing Syria.
And we don't know why. And they tell us it's to protect the homeland.
(pause) The homeland.” It's easy to say that of course we should be
talking about Syria today and of course we don't know how, especially
in public. Forti accepts this ethical challenge gracefully. “We
want the borders that we established after WWI to hold.” Is it her
age, her quivering gestures, the humbleness of the situation (a small
studio theater, an audience of dance people) that help us to see the
tragic absurdity in this statement? With her head gently bobbing
beyond her control, she gestures, “If I'm the map, Iran is on this
side (right thigh), and Saudi Arabia is on this side (left thigh),
and Iraq is here (hands form a triangle over her crotch).” I'm
reminded of Deena Metzger's late 70s or early 80s efforts to map the
world onto the body, a feminist imaginary that recognizes the many
resonances between one's body and one's world, between one's
perception and one's projection. Considering her own body/mind/self,
Metzger asked questions like, where are my borders open and where are
they fortified? Where is there starvation or drought? Where are the
rivers dammed and where are the war zones?

Forti emerges from a similar era of
feminism and an art scene whose political critique of art and society
led them to share creative process as “product” (Prioritizing
“practice” as Arrington and Hewit might assert). For News
Animation, Forti reads a newspaper and takes notes in the form of
poetic journaling. In tonight's performance the notes were read live,
an exposure of process but also a deepening of the material,
revisiting it but from the past, rewinding time to reconsider the
now. “Colonialism. I can never remember so I reach for my colon.”
Her body grounds and recontextualizes language, perhaps patriarchy
and its logic as well. Reading from a notebook, head bowed to the
page, white hair vibrating with her shakes, she recounts a dream of
power men and their penises and closed sexual circuits that exclude
everyone else.

A dance with a white sweater and scarf
shifts unexpectedly into a story of fish that know how to organize in
solidarity and resistance. Forti is a gentle master. Using the
tactics of innocent (or is it subversive) children's theater, she
transforms the clothing into a snowy Montana horizon along her body
(mountain), and then admits to failing to represent the milky way...
Perfect and imperfect, her imagination always in process of both
refinement and wilding, an ethical feminist artist researcher child
whose failures are gateways to magic.

Lucinda Childs

Carnation (1964)

Performed by Hope Mohr

White chair. Black table. Red leotard.
Blue jeans. Her right foot in a blue plastic bag. A kitchen sieve
treated as an iconic or holy object. Carefully she constructs
sandwiches from green sponges and pre-cut carrots that fit the width
of the sponge. Color and form redux: Fluxus tasks, Dada disruptions,
Judson deconstructions. Carrots ceremoniously inserted into sieve
create an altar of orange radiance, then a crown when place
delicately on her head. Many sponges are stacked vertically and one
end inserted into her mouth. The mask is further manipulated by
cramming the fanned gaps of the sponges with the carrots from her
crown. The game ends by spitting everything into the blue bag removed
from her foot.

At the back wall she does a headstand.
In precarious balancing she performs a circus act with socks and a
white sheet and she disappears. Ta da! It recalls certain
actions/images in Xavier LeRoy's Self Unfinished, created 34 years
later.

She captures air in the plastic bag and
it stands unsupported. Another circus act with magic fully exposed
and yet it's still magical, that is, whimsical, unexpected, and
previously unimagined. She looks at it. Stomps it. Smiles. Proudly.
The smile turns on and off. Then she cries. Steps away. She performs
tasks with arbitrary rules that must be obeyed. If this isn't the
essence of art, it's one of them.

I propose this work for an Izzy: best
reconstruction of 2014!

Hope Mohr

s(oft is) hard (2014)

Performed by Peiling Kao

Sound by Ben Juodvalkis, Video by David
Szlasa, Costume by Keriann Egeland

We hear the sound of writing, by hand.
A mix of knocking and scratching. Peiling faces away from the
audience but her face, in close up, is projected, large, as if
staring back at us. She is wearing black tights and a blue crocheted
top. A voice over, Hope I presume, tells of writing 89 journals in 20
years. She recites specific dates but not the entry that follows...
After reading through the journals while making this piece, the voice
tells us that she recycled all of them except the first and the last,
numbers 1 and 89. I believe her and vow to hold on to my old journals
even tighter.

There is a more complicated
relationship between text and movement, or language and embodiment,
than in the previous works tonight's program. More dates. More sounds
of writing. More silences. More shapes and gazes and self-touching
gestures and other dancing movement. Minimal piano accompanies the
continued chronological progression of dates...we're in the
90s...then 2000s. Video is intermittent. We switch from face cam to
feet. Peiling's breath becomes the dominant text as her movement
increases in vigor. Today's date. Tomorrow's date. She rolls and
jumps repeatedly. A virtuosity that impresses, viscerally. On her
back, the lights fade, slowly.

Resources:

Deena Metzger

I can't find the actual reference that
was a radio piece from the 80s but here's her current work:

I am an enemy of the slow fade to black
at the end of a dance. Also the device of the blackout to begin a
piece, to tell the audience that it has begun, and to allow the
dancers to enter the space unseen (or the suggestion of unseen since
I can almost always see and hear them). The framing of the stage or
the theatrical moment with darkness is a cliché, a trope emptied of
any specific meaning that carries more ideological weight than
dancers in the US are taught to consider. In San Francisco I witness
these devices at almost every concert I attend. In the “contemporary”
dance scenes I frequent in Europe or New York, they are extremely
rare, and when they occur they are more likely to be conceptually
integral to the work.

Choreographer Christy Funsch enters to
give the (now) compulsory pre-show announcement that unnecessarily
frames dance performances in SF... but with a twist... when we
realize that the announcement is (integrated into) the performance.
Information about exits and cell phones erodes into awkward silences
and unfinished statements, until finally Funsch states, “I am
nothing” and exits as if lost... This opening action reveal's
Christy's dry (or is it wry?) sense of humor that threads through and
sometimes even structures her work.

A woman in a red dress plays electric
guitar with five young, fit, multiculti, dancers. Christy and Nol
(Simonse) are the seasoned performers in this work, sometimes
exaggerating their “experience” by playing old farts who need
help from the young whippersnappers. When they chat, the text and
performance are so unforced. The audience relaxes. It's easy to laugh
along and enjoy. Later Christy tells me that the conversation is
improvised. I say it's like watching old friends play together. Super
charming. Amid family tales of sisters and coming out, they talk
about story versus nonlinearity and ponder the relationship between
construction and imagination.

SF choreographers never got the memo
that unison movement is “out” or at least should be questioned
and not assumed as integral to dance making. But then I think about
how many companies based in SF (at least 5, maybe 6...) employ
photographer RJ Muna to make them look practically indistinguishable,
their (wannabe) sexy lithe bodies revealing lots of bare skin,
leaping. Add some flying fabric for extra drama. Neo-classical
modernism thrives here. That's not what Christy's doing with her
young dancers, but it's a meandering rant that follows my questioning
of her use of synchronized ensemble movement. What is possible to
communicate, invoke, or inspire with dancing and when is unison the
best tool or sign for choreography?

The next section involved the Dance
Brigade's Grrrl Brigade on Taiko drums, led by Bruce Ghent. I thought
Bruce's role was perhaps too big for a young female empowerment
project but my main experience was of the joyful power of the taiko,
and the particularly feminist approach to taiko that the Dance
Brigade, with Bruce's coaching, has brilliantly pioneered. I don't
know whether it was the thrill of the precision drumming or the
ubiquitousness of teen girls in daisy dukes but I didn't notice at
first how short the girls' denim shorts were. But when I did, they
distracted me. How does fashion happen? Can shorts be too short? And
would I be a terrible parent of a teenage femme?

The young dancers help out the fake-old
dancers and everyone plays together – electric guitar, taiko teens,
big showy dancing. What does dancing do? It invites me to ponder
issues of age and power, of gender and sexuality, of color and
racism, of the relationship between individual and group, of the
invisible exchanges and collaborations from which choreography
emerges. Maybe a better question is, “what does dancing want?” or
“what do dancers and dance makers want?” But maybe not.

Nol joined the quintet for encounters
of touching and measuring. I'm writing this in Rome from notes I
scribbled in the program's margins three weeks ago. And this note
doesn't trigger any memories. I wonder how long I've been watching
Nol perform... more than a decade I'm sure. He's a generous dancer
who plays well with others in so many different contexts. I loved
seeing him outside a sprawling warehouse in Oakland in the work of
Mary Armentrout and I remember being provocatively surprised when I
finally saw him in his own work.

My notes kinda fall apart. I noted
three slow pods, cuddling but not ________ then simply “taiko +
dance” and an observation about recurring cross generational themes
that made me re-assess my earlier comment about Bruce and the Grrrl
Brigade.

The emotional tone of the work
coalesced with the entrance of a team of young girls from the SF
Community Music Center's Children's Chorus. The vibe intensified –
I don't know how to describe it but something was happening – to
all of us it seemed – the energetic-emotional field intensified
when Christy and Nol started dancing, fierce at first and then in
unison. “Horses in my dreams...” the girls sang. Teens hung out
in the back, looking out windows, and although the image was 'staged'
it didn't feel fake. It just felt good, like how it's supposed to be,
and I mean the whole thing, all of us, sitting there in the dark and
light. The person beside me started to cry which simply seemed like
part of the plan, or part of the potential of the plan, as if
(Christy's) choreography is not a plan but an invitation for an
experience to happen, inside and among us.

The song ended. A light, fast,
repeating dance moved upstage, with one dancer downstage center
focusing our gaze into a four-generational world of music and
dancing, in the Mission, where many of us live(d) and work(ed). And
this history of place and creativity, while delicate, seemed neither
precarious nor exceptional but just right, just right now.

Response by Christy Funsch,
choreographer of This Is The Girl

One
of the most difficult decisions I made in my recent full-length work,
This is the Girl, was how to costume the teenage women of the Grrrl
Brigade (who accompanied several sections of the work on Taiko). I
allowed the six 8-year old girls from San Francisco's Community
Center (who sang to accompany the last section of the work) to dress
as they wished-why wouldn't I offer the same freedom to the teeagers?

Perhaps
because it isn't so simple. Questions of who is in charge and in
control of their presentation in public beleaguered my wrangling. Do
they realize that they stand on the brink of our culture's vapid
insistence on objectifying them? They study dance and music (and some
have for ten years or more), with Krissy Keefer's Dance Brigade, a
crucial, strident collection of women who have pushed back against
mainstream depictions of femininity for decades. Surely some of this
counter-cultural politic has rubbed off? Why, then, when given the
choice of costuming, did they all decide to wear revealing,
tight-fitting clothing very similar to each other's and very much
emphasizing their physiques?

Should
I have asked them to wear pajamas? Or martial arts clothing?

Most
disappointing to me is owning that when I was wrangling over this
decision I did not set aside time to have this conversation with
them. I should have made it as much of a priority as getting their
music rehearsed. It also brings up for me a larger query which served
as subtext for the work, subtext that was latent perhaps but
nonetheless alive in my decision to assemble an age-diverse cast for
the work. Is there a time when we realize our place in power's
structure? Does this happen at different times depending on where you
are in the structure? How does our confidence shift when we grow from
young girls into teenagers? What happens when we come into sexual
awareness and how can we cultivate autonomy in young women when it
happens-not just inside the household but all of us, culturally? Is
provocative dress a sign of empowerment or compliance with
expectations and objectification? Is it the height of conformity or a
bold act of rebellion and resistance?

I
don't know and will now have to (sadly) file under "conversations
that didn't happen." I was so focused on the power implicit in
the choreography (what I call "who is lifting whom"), that
I missed an opportunity to engage the extended cast in this
troubling, rich discussion.

August 22, 2014

I have just returned from a march in solidarity with the Committee for Justice & Love for Alex Nieto, who was killed by SF police earlier this year. Alex was unarmed, eating a burrito in a local park before going to work as a security guard. Inspired by the national uprising in response to the unjust and racist killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, I decided to take a moment to familiarize myself with a few of the many non-threatening people shot and killed by local police. Street protests and riots, in addition to legal and bureaucratic activism, are shifting the public discourse, building communities of resistance, and will hopefully result in more indictments and imprisonment of police. We have to increase the costs and consequences - lawsuits, civil unrest, imprisonment, public relations - for police brutality, racial profiling, and murder. And we have to increase support and respect for the families of the victims, those who have to deal with the ongoing insult of being denied justice and honesty from local police, judges, media, and government.

Shot 3 times by Oakland cop Miguel
Masso. Blueford was hanging out with friends at night in East
Oakland, when an unmarked car without lights approached. As cops
emerged to question them, Blueford was shot running away. Last words,
“I didn't do anything.”

Mario Romero

23 years old

September 2, 2012

Killed by Vallejo police Sean Kenney
and Dustin Joseph who fired over 30 bullets into the car, 11 which
hit and killed Romero. An additional 5 bullets hit but did not kill
Romero's brother in law Joseph Johnson.

Andy Lopez

13 years old

October 22, 2013

Sonoma county deputy sherriff Erick
Gelhaus shot Andy seven times because the 8th grader was
carrying a toy gun designed to look like an AK47.

Errol Chang

34 years old

March 20, 2014

Chang, who had documented mental health
issues, barricaded himself in his house in Pacifica. A SWAT team
broke into the home. Chang stabbed one of the team and was then shot
and killed.

Alejandro “Alex” Nieto

28 years old

March 21, 2014

Shot at over fourteen times and killed
by the San Francisco Police Department, on Bernal Hill Park in San
Francisco, without justification.

Yanira Serrano-Garcia

18 years old

June 23, 2014

Killed by San Mateo county deputy Mehn
Trieu who was responding to a call for fire department paramedics.
Yanira had a history of mental health issues and was extremely
agitated.

Jacorey Calhoun

23 years old

August 4, 2014

Shot in the head by Alameda county
deputy sheriff Derek Tomas as he fled, unarmed, in East Oakland.

To confuse, coverup, and deny their
illegal and deadly actions, the police have withheld reports, denied
family access to the body, presented conflicting stories about the
incident, tried to protect the identity of the cops, slandered and
blamed the victim, and/or tried to sabotage investigations of the
death. In multiple situations the police have lied about what
happened. In several situations the victim had a known history of
mental health issues which was communicated to the officers. These
cop killings, and thousands of others, are instigated by chronic,
structural practices: racial profiling of young black or brown men,
police violence and other militarized responses to non-threatening
situations and mental health emergencies, and a total lack of
accountability for police brutality, racism, and murder. Oscar
Grant's killer, thanks to intense street protests and bureaucratic
activism, is the only law enforcement officer to be jailed for
unjustly killing an unarmed person.

That said, and following this post, I
intend to never use the word publicly again. The battle - and why it
had to be a battle I don't know - is over.

I was called a fag at least weekly for
most of high school. It hurt. It sucked. It was violent. Sometimes I
fought back (e.g., "you're just mad cuz I came in your hair last
night," was a favorite retort. Then I ran, into a classroom or
the library.) When I moved to SF and met self-identified radical
faggots I delighted in referring to myself and my gay buddies as fags
and faggots. I still use the term to promote intimacy playshops when
I want to invoke a particularly fierce energy of my/our history and
to challenge the gentrification of the mind that continues to erode
radical solidarity.

When queer emerged as a collective
name, I finally came fully out, and fully home. I had been waiting
for an anti-assimilationist identity that separated me from Castro
clones and capitalist gays and linked me to a motley crew and their
dissident differences. Queer was an intersectional action poem of
punk rage and gay liberation and lesbian feminism and SM dykes and
bisexual playparties and trans visibility and radical faerie and poly
hippy and AIDS activism and genderqueer body/fashion poets... and all
kinds of dissident, fierce LGBT and POC identities and scenes. Queer
was intensely debated during its rise in popular and academic use,
especially by old school gay men who had been cut, bashed, and
terrorized by the word, and the legalized violence that backed up
that insult. Perhaps if transpeople had been the most vocal (or most
heard) in rejecting the term queer, it wouldn't be in use today. But
we recognized then that the effort to freeze the word queer as an
insult, as embodied pain, would be a conservative mistake, a
reactionary misstep in the movement towards our healing and
liberation. We could compare the strategic re-appropriation of queer
or tranny to the movement around the slurs faggot, nigger, and dyke.

What's new about today's debate
(besides that it is happening online where folks can dismiss or
insult anyone they disagree with, without having to look at them or
learn anything about them), is that this time, the folks who want
everyone to agree on a single meaning and a single history for a
word, are winning. Of course, one could also recognize that the folks
that speak from the margins, from the place of hurt, for the (most)
oppressed, are winning, finally, one small battle among thousands.

Those who defend an immediate stop to
the queer use of the t-word cannot accept or even acknowledge that
several high profile, pioneering, transgender artist-activists reject
the 'censorship' of tranny. They use tranny on themselves, and their
friends, and accept it almost as a term of endearment. Is it really
that simple to call these people blinded by privilege and out of
touch as if aging made them stupid instead of wise? Multiple
generations and diverse communities do not always share a word's
value, meaning, history, uses, habits, or intentions. I wish that was
OK or that we had more strategies for dealing with paradox and
difference, and that includes the asymmetrical power dynamics that
structure so much violence in and around difference. Violence for
some, privilege for others. That's what difference is. How could we
possibly agree on a single language or tactic for confronting that
violence? And why would anyone, familiar with the violence of
exclusion or social death, take a prohibitionist or censorship stance
towards a word used more within their communities of solidarity than
without?

I'm going to miss the détournement of
slander and I await the blooming of a new Q generation's
action-poetry of identity, healing and solidarity.

The
issue about drag queens not 'entitled' to 'appropriate' the word tranny
is messed up in all kinds of ways, especially if you've been to SF Bay
Area drag clubs where transgender, cisgender, crossdresser, transvestite, butch, femme, and genderqueer have all been involved in various approaches to drag performances. I've seen
many trans people in drag in SF, and many a drag artist has transitioned
genders after making community in queer drag scenes. It's complicated,
and I mean the intersection of our bodies our lives our experiences our
suffering our vision our social death our resistance our creativity our
options our lack of options our solidarity our alienation...

I
am not a 'fan' of the t-word and I rarely use it. And only after it's
prompted or already part of the conversation, and never to name someone I
don't know.

Camp and transgressive humor are healthy and subversive responses to pain and insult, violence and inequity. Trannyshack is a club where a lot of great things happened
for a lot of people. Integral to the club's
charm was the (lite) transgression of the borders and rules that queers
have set up to protect ourselves from further harm. Gender was not the
only 'situation' that was re-framed, satirized, toyed or fucked with
through drag. There was race and ethnicity drag, dis/ability drag, age
(too young, too old) drag, celebrity drag, and more shit jokes than can
be counted... As fast as queers could come up with new identities,
fashions, sexual habits, STDs, and political issues, they would be imitated, appropriated, and
clowned at Trannyshack along with politicians and pop stars.

The name
of the club was part of that clowning transgression. It was post punk Camp. We knew it was
wrong but we smiled inside when we said it. And we knew that we were
participating in a temporal yet crucial experiment in queer culture, the
kind of ritual that, yes Dorothy, actually creates a better world than
the one we grew up in. But all naming is political and I guess the
powerlessness of being unable to change mainstream culture's naming
(sexist and racist sports naming, pop culture naming, official history
book naming...) leads us to practice on smaller targets like a drag
club. Unfortunate.

PS

Heklina has asked for support and
patience as s/he rebrands the club - Trannyshack - that gave many of
us more life than we knew was possible. The fucked up and campy name
was part of the charm, and I mean charm politically, aesthetically,
and spiritually. If you want some queer-is-supposed-to-be-disturbing
nostalgia, watch the documentaries I Am Divine and Kate Bornstein is
a Queer and Pleasant Danger, or read Philip Huang's notes on the
importance of being offensive.

April 16, 2014

White and straight teeth are
over-valued. We accept a level of unnecessary, violent, medical
intervention in our mouths that most of us would not tolerate
anywhere else in or on our bodies. In fact we voluntarily pay for it.
And we subject our children to it, with whiter ideals and more
intervention and expense normalized for each new generation. In other
areas of health care and healing there are more options, rooted in
traditional and/or holistic paradigms that tend towards less
intervention, less hierarchical relationships between doctor/healer
and patient, and less involvement in big pharma or the
medical-industrial-complex. In medical dentistry we have once again
nurtured the worst of our religio-racist ideologies by fusing
'cleanliness' and 'purity' with 'healthy' and 'privileged.' And like
most body-fascist ideals, we have obediently pursued (and demanded of
our Hollywood and pop stars) straight white teeth beyond our limits,
both pain and financial. Too many dentists (and too many car
mechanics) try to sell more services than are necessary just to make
more money. This happens so often, it seems normal, like bleached
teeth. It's called capitalism, and it's happening in your mouth.
Strong, healthy, long lasting teeth do not need to be pure white or
straight, and neither do you.

PS

Brushing immediately after eating
sabotages your mouth's built in cleaning and healing mechanisms. It
is now recommended that we wait at least 30 minutes. It's unlikely
that your dentist told you that, and if they did, it was less than 10
years ago, and they definitely didn't apologize for giving you bad
health advice for the previous years. Maybe the medical research is
recent but the knowledge, or perhaps wisdom, that our bodies have
self-cleaning and self-healing mechanisms should not be news to first
world people with university degrees. But the history of the
university, despite its brief flirtation with alleged universal
access, has always been to institutionalize hierarchies of knowledge
and create a sect of wealthier, more privileged, more powerful
'leaders.' You do not deserve to be hired or kissed because your
teeth are bloodily scraped and toxically bleached. And you look
ridiculously unbelievable playing 'real' people on TV. Again, strong,
healthy, long lasting teeth do not need to be pure white or straight,
and neither do you.

April 2, 2014

Since Fall 2012 I have watched a lot of
action films. I would type searches like: best political action
films, best action films of all time, best political thrillers, best
action films with a female lead, then make lists and start streaming.
I was annoyed by tired tropes of cold war fantasies and racially or
ethnically defined “bad guys” but I kept watching. I took delight
with the number of cops and government agents killed in these movies
and how often cops, CIA, FBI, and anyone who worked for the
government were portrayed as corrupt, profiteering, racist, and
inept. I also became curious and critical in learning how US
nationalism could be salvaged, manufactured, and glorified in these
narratives through the use of morally correct rogue agents or cops,
i.e., through handsome butch white masculinity, excellent fighting
technique, and insensitivity to pain. Pride in country, faith in war,
and acceptance of torture and murder went hand in hand with
demonstrating that cops and government are both dirty and stupid.
This combination cynically seduces populist success while avoiding
the dangerous political critique that seems always just outside the
frame (of the picture, of our imaginations, of the industry).

I
barely know how to address the sexism and racism in most action films
and I'm sure that many have done it already, even if I'm not aware of
their work. Very few action films can pass the Bechdel test: Do two
women talk to each other, about something other than a man? The
Bechdel test emerged as a satirical joke and was not intended as
rigorous analysis. There are similar “tests” questioning whether
a film has two people of color or two African Americans who talk to
each other about something other than race. That these tests do not
provide a complete analysis of a movie's treatment of race, color,
gender, and sexuality, does not deny the foundational supremacist
structures - male and white - that are firmly in place in way too
many action films.

Anyway, I'm more of a performance artist than a
film critic, so I wrote a speech to address the overwhelming
narrative tendency of man-saves-woman, or man-revenges-woman's death,
to justify massive human, environmental, and architectural carnage.
These exhausted and exhausting narratives frame white woman and girls
as weak and vulnerable so that we (an image
of) the heroic macho and morally righteous white man and the country
he stands for can recuperated or salvaged. Both white man and white nation are crippled by the
end of the movie but on the mend. Racialized representations of evil
are so banal in these films that the popular imagination has been
molded into a catalogue of types reinforced by TV news, courtroom
proceedings, and popular history books.

In “Why are women always
being kidnapped in films? ( UK Guardian, Nov 2013), Anne Billson
refers to female kidnappings as “the laziest of flimsy plot
devices” that reduce the female character to a chattel, tied to a
chair, dragged screaming across a warehouse or a fancy office or a
bourgeois home, “a crime of theft committed against her husband,
boyfriend, or father.” These movies don't get awards from the
Academy or in Cannes but they make shit loads of money for a really small
number of people, most of whom are straight white men, or can play
one in a movie.

I wanna daughter so I can kill cops

or perhaps,

I wanna die saving a (sexy) woman

I wanna daughter so I can kill tons of
people to protect her.

I want the roles that Liam Neeson gets
to work out his grief and rage.

I wanna kill people and bash their
brains in and blow up their houses to save my wife or daughter.

I want the roles that Jason Stathem
gets because I wanna kill tons of people to protect a nun or my wife
or my daughter and her best friend.

I wanna perfect that look that says: I
don't want to kill people unless I have to.

I want an amazing gun with unlimited
bullets or cartridges so I can kill people while saving women from
asshole guys who value profits more than female lives.

I wanna be a rogue cop, a good guy cop,
in Baltimore or New York or LA or Hong Kong,

in a TV series, in which avenging the
death of women gives me license to rough guys up, punch dudes in the
face, and break every kind of law ever written.

I especially want someone to kidnap my
daughter so I can kill cops.

Tons of cops.

I wanna kill inept cops, stupid cops,
corrupt cops, racist cops, and the cops who are always protecting the
newest gang of Russian or Serbian or Chinese criminals.

I wanna play an elite Navy seal with
paranoid delusions and a broken heart.

I wanna play a black ops assassin with
amnesia.

I wanna play a trained killer, an elite
super soldier, who has such intense amnesia I can't even remember my
name or my wife's name, but I can meet new women to protect and then
be confronted with hundreds of stupid cops that deserve to die
because they're corrupt and have terrible aim, and FBI agents that
deserve to die because they're corrupt and know more about me than I
do and they're running dirty black ops that should have been shut
down in the 50s or the 80s but after 9/11 are more funded and more
dirty than ever.

Yah give me a woman to save from the
clutches of evil and I will kill as many cops and FBI agents and
ethnic mafia and Arab terrorists as you can throw at me.

I wanna play a highly trained killer
with amnesia who can somehow find my stash of fake passports and
stacks of dollars, yen, and euros.

I wanna play a frighteningly
traumatized straight guy with nothing to lose because it's already
all been taken.

I wanna play a drugged and disoriented
professional assassin with such crazy embodied intelligence and blood
memory that I can remember anything about any weapon ever designed
but I can't find my name or my parents or my girlfriend.

I wanna play the badass good guy that
bad guys provoke by kidnapping my mom or my girlfriend, and then
torture her just to get me to respond.

I wanna play a crazy post traumatic
stress super soldier who can't remember my name who goes on a
terrifying revenge tour around Wall Street, the Kremlin, the
Whitehouse, the Arc de Triomphe, a brand new skyscraper in Dubai or
Shanghai, or some gorgeous Greek or South Asian island.

I wanna kill the bad people who killed
my girlfriend and then ran my parents off the road to make it look
like an accident.

I wanna make the world safe again for
good people, and white women, and especially white little girls. I
wanna play an ex soldier, an ex assassin, an ex sharp shooter, an ex
secret agent.

I wanna play a dude who just wants to
be a straight white low key dude again, but who is dragged back into
the killing game by bad motherfuckers who just can't give it up, who
would get my daughter addicted to heroin or crack or oxy before
selling her to a super wealthy Arab or Russian with a killer yacht.

I wanna kill for god and justice and
country even if it seems like I no longer believe in anything.

I wanna kill people and know that deep
down, with your consent, that those people deserved to die and those
buildings deserved to be blown up and that anyone caught in the cross
fire or who had to run terrified as my helicopter crashed into their
office while they were at work on payroll taxes will totally
understand that cleansing the world of corrupt violent men demands
occasional waves of intensified and over exaggerated urban massacres.

I wanna be an ex CIA black ops assassin
who moves to a small town and tries to have a normal family that can
be kidnapped and tortured to get me back into my killing game.

I want Schwartznegger's role in
Commando.

I want to save my kidnapped daughter,
while taking down a South American dictator and single handedly
destroying the drug flow from Columbia.

I wanna kill 150 badass Latino guys in
a one man assault at the drug lord's secret jungle hide out.

I wanna kill corrupt politicians and
their security team by shooting their escape helicopter out of the
sky.

And I wanna free my kidnapped, abused,
sexually humiliated daughter as the copter explodes into a fiery
tornado and crashes into the secret drug warehouse burning everything
to the ground.

I wanna play Nicholas Cage in Stolen,
Eric Bana in Hana, and Nicholas Cage in Kick Ass.

I wanna use my advanced killer training
to teach my daughter to protect herself and eventually to kill her
own evil mother who works for the CIA or the cops or a major
financial institution. And I want to kill a bunch of nefarious dudes
right in front of her so she knows that she will never be safe
without a gun in her hand, a blade at her hip, and hair dye to change
her looks.

I wanna play a genetically modified
super killer with amnesia who feels no pain and can speak ten
languages and knows that all women I come in contact with will either
get shot, kidnapped, sold into slavery, or have to cut and die their
hair in a hotel bathroom.

I wanna play Matt Damon, Jeremy Reiner,
or any other non balding square jaw who will never need to change my
look even when my photo is uploaded to every Mi6, KGB, CIA, and
Mossad agent in the world.

I wanna play an amazing USAmerican
super killer and cyber genius whose bruised and broken faith in his
country can only be restored through a fight to the death with zombie
Russians or genetically modified Russians or triple agent Russian oil
spies, because Russia is still our greatest enemy and without evil
Russia there is no democratic USA.

If I'm gonna die, I wanna die saving my
own daughter, or any girl, a really sexy girl, or all the girls and
bring glory to my country.

If I'm gonna die I wanna die saving all
the women of Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq or all Muslim women or all
the prostitutes or all the sex slaves.

I wanna kill 100 perps and johns and
another 100 dirty cops and politicians so I can save a single
trafficked woman in New York or Bangkok or Sydney or Vegas.

I wanna bust some heads and shoot out
some kneecaps and burn a few sex prisons to the ground so I can stop
an international sex slavery ring run by an ethnically diverse
collaboration of evil Chinese, Indonesian, Serbian, and African
American criminal misogynists, strip club owners, and child
pornographers.

I wanna chase down the top bad guy, I
mean the untouchable serial rapist mass assassin who wants to destroy
the world in the image of his own destroyed soul and if that means
shooting up a Nigerian slum or a Thai slum or a Mexican slum or an
African American public housing block or a Palestinian refugee camp
or a historic Moroccan market, then I will.

circo zero / performance

Rants, Raves, Reflections, & Revisions

Keith Hennessy blogs occasionally about performance, contemporary dance, and political action, in San Francisco, USA, Europe and beyond. Performance making, teaching and viewing as research and revival. Performance writing as a practice of critical witness, reflection, and discussion.